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The SS Edmund Fitzgerald was a ship that sank suddenly, without a distress signal, in a storm on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975. She sank in 530 feet of water at a position 46 degrees 59.9' N, 85 degrees 06.6' W, which is about 17 statue miles from the entrance to Whitefish Bay. All 29 crew on board were killed. This was the last major ship lost on the Great Lakes.
The Fitz was a 729-foot-long ore freighter with a capacity for over 25,000 tons of ore. When she was built in 1958 at the Great Lakes Engineering Works in River Rouge, Michigan, the Fitzgerald was the largest ship on the Great Lakes, though ships are now 1,000 by 105-feet with twice the Fitz's cargo capacity. She originally had a coal fired plant, but that was converted to an oil fired plant during the 1971-72 winter. The ship had a large cargo hold that held the ore. The cargo was loaded and discharged through twenty-one water-tight hatches, each measuring 11'7" by 54' of 5/16" steel.
She was owned by the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance company and chartered to the Columbia Transportation Division of the OglebayNorton Corporation. She was used to carry taconite from the mines near Duluth, Minnesota to iron works in Detroit, Toledo and other ports.
She left Superior, Wisconsin on the afternoon of November 9, 1975 under the Captain Ernest M. McSorley. She was enroute to Detroit, Michigan with a full cargo. Crossing Lake Superior at about 15 mph, she ran into a storm and reported winds in excess of 50 knots and waves approaching 16 feet. A second freighter, the SS Arthur M. Anderson, was following between 10-15 miles behind the Fitz. Due to the storm, the Locks at Sault Sainte Marie were closed, and the freighters were heading to Whitefish Bay for shelter. On the afternoon of November 10, 'the Fitz had reported some top-side damage and a list, but did not indicate that it was serious. She sank suddenly. Her last communication was at about 1910 that evening. The Anderson could neither raise her nor see her on radar at 1920. At 2032, the Anderson informed the Coast Guard of their concern for about the Fitzgerald. There was no distress signal received.
Once the Anderson noted the loss of the Fitzgerald, a search was launched for survivors. The initial search consisted of the Anderson, and a second freighter, the William Clay Ford. A third freighter, the Canadian vessel Hilda Marjanne, had to turn back due to the weather. The Coast Guard launched three aircraft, but was unable to get any ships on scene quickly. The Coast Guard Buoy Tender, Woodbrush, which was on a six-hour standby in Duluth, was able to launch within two and a half hours, but was not on scene until 24 hours later. The search recovered debris including lifeboats and life rafts, but no survivors.
The wreck was first located by a US Navy aircraft with Magnetic Anomaly Detection equipment. The wreck was further surveyed using side scan sonar on November 14 - 16 by the Coast Guard. The sonar revealed two large objects lying close together on the lake floor. A second survey took place from November 22 through 25 by a private contractor, Seaward, Inc.
The next year, from May 20 through 28, an unmanned U.S. Navy submersible photographed the ship. This submersible, called the CURV III system, had an underwater vehicle and an umbilical control and power cable that connected it to a surface support ship. It contained one 35 mm still camera and two black and white video cameras. It found the Edmund Fitzgerald lying in two large pieces under 530 feet of water. The bow section, approximately 276 feet long, lay upright in the mud. The stern section lay 170 feet away; the stern is inverted (face down) in the mud and a 50 degree angle from the bow section.
A Coast Guard investigation concluded that the most probable cause of the accident was the loss of bouyancy and stability that resulted from massive flooding of the cargo hold. The flooding was postulated to have taken place from ineffective hatch closures as the waves crashed along the deck. The flooding, which would have been gradually occuring throughout the final day, finally resulted in such a loss of bouyancy and stability that the vessel plunged to the bottom.
The ship's bell was recovered from the wreck and is now in the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Point near Paradise, Michigan. An anchor from the ship lost on an earlier trip was recovered from the Detroit River and is on display at the Dossin Great Lakes Museum in Detroit.
Gordon Lightfoot's "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is a song about the tragedy. It proved to be a hit which made the incident the most famous marine disaster in the history of Great Lakes shipping.
Although the last ship lost, and the largest, the Fitzgerald is not alone on the bottom. All the lakes have a history of nautical disaster. There is no agreement on how many ships have been wrecked or sunk, but they number in the thousands. Between the years 1878 and 1898 there were 5999 shipwrecks on the Great Lakes. About a quarter of that number were listed as total losses. Some ships and crews simply vanished in storms. A number of marine preserves have been set up in divable areas that have high numbers of sunken ships.
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